Imparting Information and Influencing Behaviour: An Examination of Staff Briefing Sessions

Abstract

Face-to-face communication between managers and has been widely commended as beneficial in organisations. Indeed, the evidence shows that managers spend a good deal of their time in face-to-face exchange as part of their role and that the proportion of time spent in this way increases with seniority (Adler & Rodman, 1991; Mintzberg, 1973). The role of the daily briefing has been much celebrated in the literature which focuses on Japanese-style management. The team briefing is seen as an important vehicle for imbuing the philosophy of quality, central to organisational strategy. In a commentary on the Japanese approach, Wickens observed, If there is one aspect to be singled out as important in team building and commitment it is the five minute meeting at the start of the day (1987, p. 85). Whilst organisational communication generally and superior-subordinate communication specifically has received considerable attention, few studies exist of briefing sessions or similar types of meetings. We know relatively little about how briefings are used in organisations and the extent to which they can influence employee behaviour. This paper attempts to bridge part of that gap by reporting a case study of briefing sessions. Data were collected in nine stores owned by a large, retail chain based in the United Kingdom, where company policy required managers to start the day's business by conducting a briefing session. This paper will show how the briefings were used and the effect they had on employee behaviour. By the term staff briefing session we are referring to short, regular meetings which take place between managers and groups of in the workplace. These meetings usually take place at the start of each working day. They can be used to achieve two main purposes. First, they impart information on practices, procedures, targets, expected behaviours, and organisational rules (Daft, 1995). Second, they evoke behavioural responses from employees, for example, increasing motivation and commitment, or reinforcing a team spirit. Briefing sessions primarily provide one-way communication from superiors to subordinates, in the form of a short, oral presentation from a manager or supervisor. However, employees usually have the opportunity to ask questions, provide further information, comment, or respond in other ways. Whilst these activities have been seen as being central to the success of Japanese management styles, they are in no sense unique to Japanese management. Managers in many workplaces hold short, informal, unstructured briefing sessions with prior to the start of work. The Industrial Society, a British consulting group, encourages organisations to adopt briefings and has developed a set of briefing guidelines for managers (Middleton, 1983). Marchington, Parker, and Prestwich (1989, p. 21) have noted the growth of briefings as a systematised approach to communicating information down the organisational hierarchy. Briefings are particularly important where work lacks an explicit structure or formal procedures, since in unstructured situations it is not necessarily obvious what employees should do. Although common in many organisations and in spite of the proliferation of material in the field of superior-subordinate communication, briefings have been relatively unexplored as a mechanism for influencing performance in either the long or short term. They are a management activity about which we know relatively little. For example, how do organisations implement them? How effective are they in influencing behaviour in practice? Some prescriptive material about the functions and benefits of briefings (see for example, Grummitt, 1983; Daft, 1995) and a small number of empirical studies exist. For example, Marchington et al. (1989) examined a number of approaches to team briefing and identified some of the problems associated with their implementation. …